…When Baer hit me on the chin with his Sunday punch and I took it, I’m the happiest guy in the world. Nobody knew what that fight meant to me. Money, security, education for my children, financial aid for my parents. If ever a guy went into the ring with something to fight for, I was the guy.
—James J. Braddock, 1935
JAMES J. BRADDOCK
HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD
JUNE 13, 1935–JUNE 22, 1937
And so it was, on June 13, 1935, James J. Braddock, at the age of 29, as a ten-to-one underdog, won the heavyweight championship of the world from Max Baer in a unanimous fifteen-round decision. The general response by press and public was to rule it one of the greatest upsets in boxing history. Most agreed that Baer, who was so confident he had told reporters he was afraid he might actually kill Braddock, was outfoxed and outboxed.
For two years, Braddock did not box again. Much backroom haggling was done over who would challenge him for the title. Finally, the fight was arranged. Jim would defend his crown against Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” one of the greatest boxers to ever enter the ring. On June 22, 1937, the two met in Chicago’s White Sox Stadium.
By this time, Braddock had developed arthritis in the left side. The morning of the fight, his doctor gave him a shot in the arm so he could lift it, but Braddock found that he had very little strength in it during the fight. Still, he managed to knock Louis down in the very first round with an uppercut. By round four, however, Louis had gained the advantage.
According to Braddock, “After a couple of rounds I knew I was in there with a great fighter, and this is going to be a tough fight.” The end came in the eighth round. “I fought as well as I’d ever done, but that Louis…oh, he was good! In the eighth I had nothing left, and when he hit me with that right I just lay there…. I could have stayed there for three weeks.”
Joe Louis would go on to become one of the greatest heavyweight title holders in the history of boxing. His defeat of German Max Schmeling in one round June 22, 1938, at Yankee Stadium reverberated throughout the world, thwarting a powerful symbol of German dictator Adolph Hitler’s contention of racial supremacy. Like Braddock, Joe Louis, a violin student turned pro boxer, would pay back all of the relief money he’d once accepted.
James J. Braddock would go on to fight one more match after Louis, in 1938, against the young Welsh boxer Tommy Farr, who’d gone fifteen full rounds against Joe Louis and was favored three to one going into the Braddock match. It was an exhilarating “comeback” victory for the aging Braddock, who’d yet again been rated an underdog climbing into the ring and hailed as an upset winner going out. Less than two weeks after that victorious match, however, when lucrative offers were still on the table, he announced his retirement from the sport, making the decision to go out a winner. Jim Braddock won fifty-one of eighty-five career bouts, twenty-six by KO; his record included three draws, two no contests, and seven no decisions; and boxing histories wrote about him in his epitaph as having gone down a fighting champion.
“I have won my last fight,” Braddock announced to the press at the time, “and I think I could still beat most of the outstanding contenders for the heavyweight championship, but I have spent fifteen years in the game, and in fairness to everyone, but especially to my wife and children, I believe it is time for me to withdraw…. This is my farewell to boxing, a sport which owes me nothing and to which I owe everything—the many friends I have made, and the means with which I have been able to provide for my family.”
After his boxing career ended, Jim maintained his friendship with Joe Gould, who had scored Jim a cagey deal. In return for granting Joe Louis the chance to claim the title from Braddock in 1937, Gould required that Louis’s wealthy Chicago manager, Mike Jacobs, agree to pay Braddock 10 percent of his share of the heavyweight championship fights for a decade, should Louis win. The deal is said to be one of the shrewdest ever struck in boxing, because Joe Louis’s supremacy (1937 to 1949, the longest in the sport’s history) meant Jacobs controlled the heavyweight title fights for more than ten years. It provided Jim and Mae Braddock with an annuity that helped secure their financial future.
He remained “Jersey Jim” till the day he died, residing in the same North Bergen home he and Mae had bought after he’d won the championship. For the rest of his life, Braddock was applauded, admired, and respected by friends, neighbors, and strangers on the New Jersey streets. He was inducted into the Ring Boxing Hall of Fame in 1964, the Hudson County Hall of Fame in 1991, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2001. As for any last words, they rightfully belong to James J. Braddock himself, who gave up his crown with the same gracious humility with which he’d worn it.
“Here’s the situation as far as that goes,” Braddock said in his 1972 interview with Peter Heller, two years before he passed away in his North Bergen home, “having the championship and then losing it. You always got to figure you’re not the best man in the world, there might be somebody better. That’s the way it was. That’s the way boxing is. The champion don’t always stand up. There’s always somebody coming up to take him. That’s a part of life.”
JAMES J. BRADDOCK
JUNE 7, 1906–NOVEMBER 29, 1974
And so Braddock won the big title, and in the time he has held it, he has endeared himself to the American public by his unchanging modesty, his affability, and his sturdy character. His devotion to his wife and family…and withal his attitude as champion of the world that he will fight anybody regardless of color, or creed, has made him the most popular champion in the history of the game.
—Damon Runyon,
foreword from Relief to Royalty,
James J. Braddock’s authorized biography, 1936